Hoe! Hoe! Hoe!
Image by Nik Shuliahin via Unsplash
If you mistakenly think this title is a greeting from Santa Claus, then consider this biblical text:
Now there was no smith to be found throughout all the land of Israel; for the Philistines said, “The Hebrews must not make swords or spears for themselves”; so all the Israelites went down to the Philistines to sharpen their plowshare, mattocks (‘eth), axes, or sickles. The charge was two-thirds of a shekel for the plowshares and for the mattocks, and one-third of a shekel for sharpening the axes and for setting the goads. So on the day of the battle neither sword nor spear was to be found in the possession of any of the people with Saul and Jonathan; but Saul and his son Jonathan had them (I Samuel 13:19-22).
This remarkable text describes an economy in which the Philistines controlled “the means of production,” and the Israelites were left vulnerable and dependent upon the Philistines. The Philistines deliberately maintained a monopoly on the skills and practice of a blacksmith. That posed a great burden upon the Israelites who, as peasant farmers, needed their agricultural tools serviced in order to produce crops and so to produce a livelihood. The monopoly of the Philistines was undertaken to prevent the Israelites from having military equipment, but the monopoly extended from military to agricultural equipment. Thus the Israelites had to pay a nameable amount for the sharpening of every plowshare, mattock, axe, or sickle, and we may readily add, “hoe.”
You may wonder, as I did, what a “mattock” is. I discovered that it is a tool that has a horizontal blade on one side, and a standard axe blade on the other. In my childhood we called them “grub hoes” that we used to dig up unwanted sprouts and bushes. We should not miss the point of the text. The Israelites were peasant farmers who did not and could not own their own means of production. The lack of a blacksmith extended not only to extra expense, but surely to great inconvenience each time a tool needed attention, especially during such busy times as harvest.
All parties, and certainly covenantal Israel, understood that such iron work as plowshares, mattocks, axes and sickles, while being agricultural tools, could readily be transformed into spears and swords as weapons of war. Conversely, they also understood that weapons of war, like swords and spears, could be promptly converted into agricultural tools. Thus in the most familiar prophetic poem:
They shall beat their swords into plowshares (‘eth),
and their spears into pruning hooks;
nation shall not lift up sword against nation,
neither shall they learn war any more (Isaiah 2:4; see Micah 43).
Or conversely:
Beat your plowshares (‘eth) into swords,
and your pruning hooks into spears;
let the weakling say, “I am a warrior” (Joel 3:10; Heb. 4:10).
Also of interest is the only other use of “mattock” (‘eth) in the Old Testament in II Kings 6:1-10. In his preoccupation with the needs of peasants, Elisha came upon a workman, surely a peasant, whose “axe head” (‘eth) had slipped off the handle and into the water. Elisha retrieves the axe head for the workman who was completely helpless and vulnerable without his tool. Thus Elisha performs one of his acts of restoration and rehabilitation for the peasant community. The recurring theme of all of these uses of “mattock” (’eth) is that it is a tool useful for and appropriate to peasant labor and production.
It is not, I suggest, a great surprise that this narrative of I Samuel 13:19-22 does not occur in the Common Lectionary of the church, and is never read in church. Of course it would not be heard in church as long as the church holds to the uncritical notion that its “good news” concerns spiritual life, the saving of “souls,” and the other-worldly afterlife of saved souls. Our narrative obviously has nothing to do with such matters. If, however, the church ever broadly comes to recognize that its proper “news” concerns such matters, then we might hear this text in church. When the church recognizes that the good news concerns the restoration and rehabilitation of a viable creaturely political economy marked by abundance, then this narrative would be heard in church. Such a gospel concerns how creaturely resources for a livable life are produced, distributed, and consumed. That concern, moreover, clearly involves questions of the control of the means of production. Such control of the means of production (in this case, plowshares, mattocks (‘eth), axes, and sickles) always includes the recognition that such tools can be variously deployed for well-being (as in agriculture) or for destruction (as weapons of war). It belongs to human wellbeing to have sufficient control over the means of production that such a choice can be made for tool or for weapon. In our narrative Israel was denied such a choice, with its future to some great extent kept in the hands of the Philistines.
I have taken so long with this intriguing scriptural narrative as a way of introduction to the most important book I have read in a long time, The Long Land War: The Global Struggle for Occupancy Rights by Jo Guldi (2021). The book is long, dense, and carefully documented. This is a slow, discerning account of the social reality of the world economy in which some populations are left without Lebensraum, and are therefore vulnerable to the will and whim of those who control the land. Much of Guldi’s report concerns, in recent time, the work of the Food and Agricultural Organization (FAO) that was linked to the United Nations and that was formed through the impact of the “Rome Consensus” in 1945. The FAO championed land reform and was committed to land redistribution that would permit vulnerable peasant communities to have a safe place for work, production, and life. The FAO sought a “third way” of reform that refused both market exploitation and state dictatorship, believing that ownership of small plots of land under peasant control was a way to peace and to productivity. This was an approach that struck some as obsolete and excessively old-fashioned, but it has its continuing champions, among them not least is Wendell Berry.
At the end of her book, Guldi describes two strategies for land redistribution that have been variously effective. On the one hand, she reports on squatters’ rights wherein needy displaced populations have simply occupied and claimed houses and land. Among successful efforts in this regard were the squatters’ rights practiced in London by troops returning from World War II. In London this action received widespread public approval and eventually government endorsement:
Squatting represented a new form of community that took the laws of landownership into its own hands (343).
This notion of “self-help occupancy” received vigorous and effective support from Ivan Illich and Paulo Freire (347), and was especially championed by John F. C.Turner, so that it came to be regarded as a movement of entrepreneurs (349). This effective movement of squatters needs to be read, in the context of the United States, through the narrative of Matt Desmond and his book, Eviction, that details the way in which landowners have refused such squatters rights.
The second strategy of land redistribution explored by Guldi is “the technique of the map.” It is of course the fact that our familiar and widely accepted maps are made top-down by owners, explorers, and their powerful patrons. The making of maps has determined patterns of ownership, control, domination, and eventually production and habitation. But such maps are not “given” descriptions of reality. They are in fact social constructions that are designed to legitimate and secure ownership claims. To the contrary, “the technique of the map” in this book takes the view that maps can be redrawn by other people in order to exhibit other social interests. Thus the book reports on the Appalachian Land Ownership Survey conducted by the Highlander Institute in Tennessee (356). Guldi explores the way in which peasant communities could create “a peoples’ map” that is drawn by groups (whole villages!) who walk the land and put their findings on “cheap paper.” This “participatory research movement” demonstrates that maps can be drawn differently, and that social reality can be constituted differently, and so arrived at “from below” and not “from above” as is our common assumption and practice:
Critical of expert management as these movements were—and as dedicated to rethinking the developmental process—none of them before the late 1970s had yet begun to reimagine traditional maps of land tenure. The map was, after all, one of the foremost objects of empire, having been a tool of centralized administration and colonial rule since the origins of the cadastral map in sixteenth-century Europe. By the seventeenth century, European maps were helping settlers lay claim to the lands of other peoples around the globe. By the nineteenth century, expert civil engineers and urban planners were using maps to evict poor families from neighborhoods known to house working-class radicals. In 1980, who would have imagined the map could be used to make a radical claim on the state by those traditionally excluded from participation?
The indigenous people whose land was claimed by Canada did just that—and the fact that it was they who did so is striking. Of all of the groups of peasants that had lost their land through eviction, displacement, or indebtedness, the native tribes in North America have experienced the most extreme injustice; repeated incidents of force, fraud, and broken legal contracts. From the early 1970s, tribes in Alberta had noticed overdevelopment and pollution from expanding mining works encroaching on their territory. As they began to look for a way to ask the Canadian government to enforce their rights in order to exclude miners from their territory, they became aware of the power of maps; in government courts, the map was a tool to mandate adherence to property law (365).
Guldi notes, concerning such maps:
Organizers had realized that even cheap materials could be used in a process that stressed new habits of mind, suited to the inclusion of persons formerly excluded from the institutions of rule (369).
Both strategies of squatting and mapping depended upon the empowerment of heretofore powerless persons who were able to take their lives and futures into their own hands. They could refuse to be passive recipients of whatever the “ownership class” offered them. Such strategies both evoked and required “new habits of the mind” suited to the inclusion of those long excluded from the institutions of rule. The new process of map-making was a worldwide project. In the United States it was led especially by John Gaventa who presided over the Highlander Institute. Reference should be made to his book, Power and Powerlessness: Quiescence and Rebellion in an Appalachian Valley (1980), and to The Appalachian Land Ownership Survey. Gaventa is now the Director of Research at the Institute of Developmental Studies at the University of Sussex. This university program has been at the forefront of land distribution studies, and continues its bold, brave work of fostering a new world of social possibility for heretofore powerless people.
The FAO, since it outset, has been committed to empowering peasant farmers to live and care for the land and to make it productive. Specifically, it has been a champion of providing “technology” that is appropriate to the peasant economy and to the land the peasants could farm and make productive. The technology that was most pertinent and effective, it had concluded, was the hoe, a modest form of technology suited to the productivity of small plots of land properly managed and cared for:
It was the hoe, rather than the tractor, that would transform developing nations, according to Norris Dodd. With its long handle, the hoe allowed the farmer to work standing up, rather than on his hands and knees; the hoe’s industrial steel tongue meant it would last longer than wooden implements. Cheap to manufacture and export, the steel hoe was a symbol of a developmental program that might see poor people manufacturing their own implements, turning farms into factories. Farmers, in other words, would become heralds of a future that was simultaneously industrial and rural (131).
Led by Norris Dodd, the FAO was to provide,
An information pipeline, connecting peasants of the developing world to small technologies—such as hoes and buckets—and to scientific advice (220).
To some extent the work of E. F. Schumacher would continue that passion for simple technology, though Schumacher pushed toward “pump, plow, and modern trucks” to supplement the hoe in a way that pushed toward “development.” I have taken this long with Gaudi because the FAO’s advocacy of “hoes” for peasants to claim land is a powerful, compelling counterpoint to the need for “plowshares, mattocks (‘eth), axes, and sickles” that concerned ancient Israelites. In both cases such simple technology is a sine qua non for the flourishing of a peasant economy and for the good care of the earth. The required submission of the Israelites to Philistine smiths has its contemporary counterpart in the monopoly of technology by the “developed nations” with the World Bank as its vehicle for the maintenance of monopoly and control.
Guldi reports that in the 1970s (the time of the rise of Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan!), the FAO and its advocacy for small peasant farms was overrun by the power of the market, the drive toward industrial agriculture, and the consolidation of farm land into even larger farms, and the eradication of the life and culture of small farmers. Thus we can imagine that the contest between the Philistines and the Israelites over the control of tools was an instance in the ongoing contestation between industrial bigness that is committed to growth and the concentration of wealth, and the peasant practice of modest technology that precludes big scale and that takes seriously the healthy symbiosis between the land and those who occupy it.
The issues concerning ownership, production, and technology are complex. The resolution of such complexity cannot be reached through scripture study. But scripture study may be a way of framing, or reframing, that contestation. The church’s perennial preoccupation with spiritual, soul saving, other-worldly afterlife plays into the hands of bigness, because such an accent is an abdication of what we know. For that reason we may well engage in the contestation of scripture…whether scripture is to be voiced in the cause of spiritual-soul-other worldly, afterlife, or whether the Bible is a voice of advocacy for real world concerns of production, distribution, consumption, and the force of ownership. The lack of blacksmiths in the peasant economy of ancient Israel consigned Israelites to a relationship of economic dependence, a dependence that continues to be fostered through sharecroppers, tenants, and slaves. The battles joined against the Philistines in subsequent chapters of I Samuel constitute a struggle for ownership and control of the means of production. And if we accept the hypothesis of Norman Gottwald concerning a “peasant revolt” in ancient Israel, we can see the significance of the way in which the belated son of Jesse, David, could defeat the Philistine “giant” (I Samuel 17:1-54). David is not, it turns out, impressed with the bigness of the giant, not the giant of the Philistines who demanded and dictated dependence. It was not for nothing that this small, unnoticed eighth son of Jesse defeated the giant, even as we now face the giant banks, the giant technologies, or the giant markets. Everything turns, as the FAO understood, on access to technology, a blacksmith, in order to have a sharp hoe!
The FAO was committed to hoes. The FAO understood that hoes were tools appropriate to the economy and the geography of the peasants. Against market forces the FAO championed hoes. Perhaps the FAO understood that if Israel did not have hoes, it could never have a genuine “hoe down” of singing and dancing elation when the hoes are put down in celebration at harvest. The replacement of “hoes” by machines that never rest and that need never to rest may be more “productive.” But such scale is unsustainable because the human community that relies on hoes can anticipate vibrant hoe downs.
Walter Brueggemann
January 14, 2023
Walter Brueggemann
Walter Brueggemann is one of the most influential Bible interpreters of our time. He is the author of over one hundred books and numerous scholarly articles. He continues to be a highly sought-after speaker.
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